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With Season 6 of RuPaul’s Drag Race in the books and the new queen crowned, it’s time to reflect on how our pre-season forecasts did. In February I posted a wiki survey asking who would win this season before the first episode had aired. I posted this to reddit’s r/rupaulsdragrace, Twitter, and Facebook, and it generated an impressive 15,632 votes for 435 unique user sessions. Which means the average survey taker did a little under 36 pairwise comparisons.

The plot below shows the results. The x-axis is the score assigned by the All Our Ideas statistical model and can be interpreted that, if “idea” 1 (or, in this case, queen 1) is pitted at random against idea 2, this is the chance that idea 1 will win. The color is how close the wiki survey got to the actual rank. The more pale the dot, the closer. Bluer dots mean the wiki survey overestimated the queen, while redder dots mean it underestimated them.

So how did the wiki survey do? Not terrible. Courtney Act was a clear frontrunner and had a lot of star power to carry her to the end. Bianca was a close second in the wiki survey and finally outshone her when it came to the final. These two are relatively close to each other in score. This was actually the first season in which two queens never had to lipsync. Ben DeLaCreme is ranked third in the survey, although she came in fifth. Little surprise she was voted Miss Congeniality.

After that, it gets interesting. Milk was ranked four by the survey, but came in 9th on the show. I’m thinking her quirkiness may have given folks the impression that she could go much further than she actually did. Adore, one of the top three, comes in fifth on the survey, rather close to her friend Laganja.

April Carrion and Kelly Mantle were expected to go far, but got the chop relatively early on. Darienne was a dark horse in this competition, ending up in fourth place when pre-season fans thought she’d be middling.

Lastly, Joslyn and Trinity are the biggest success stories of season 6. They had a surprising amount of staying power when folks thought they wouldn’t make it out of the first month.

So what can we learn from this? Well, for one, for a more or less staged reality show, I’m somewhat impressed by how well these rankings came out. Unlike using wiki surveys for sports forecasting, we have no prior information on contestants from season to season. Prior seasons give us no information about contestants (unless you consider something like “drag lineages”, e.g. Laganja is Alyssa Edwards’s drag daughter). All information comes from the domain expertise of drag aficionados. Courtney and Bianca were already widely regarded drag stars in their own right before the competition. Although this didn’t seem to be the case with other seasons, it seems like there was a strong Matthew effect at work this time. Is this the new normal as more well-known queens start competing?

With season 6 of RuPaul’s Drag Race beginning exactly two weeks from today, it is officially the Drag Race preseason. I had lofty ideas for this season, like doing some elaborate forecasting from Twitter data à la the line of research that’s grown aroundelectionsforecasting. But little things (my dissertation) have limited the kind of commitment I can make to that endeavor.

Instead, I’m taking some inspiration from Jay Ulfelder and using a wiki survey to generate a forecast for the winner of season 6. I’m not really sure if a preseason forecast is actually a very good tool here — I’d venture the average Drag Race viewer isn’t well-versed in the careers of most of the queens who are appearing on this season. But there are definitely viewers who have some strong opinions formed already (like my RPDR viewing buddy Ryan) so I hope to get those folks voting within the next two weeks.

Tonight is the airing of the final episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race, Season 5. They are doing what they did last season, which is to delay the final crowning until the reunion show. Apparently I wasn’t wrong last week when I said last time that they tape three different endings to the show, mostly to ward off Twitter leaks by fans in the audience. And apparently the queens themselves don’t know who won until everyone else does, according to Jinkx.

As noted by Ru on the final three episode and the “RuCap,” they encouraged fans to vote by tweeting and by reposting on Facebook. Although I can’t get Facebook data directly, I’m going to look at the Twitter data that I’ve collected. Before delving into the final predictions, I remembered that I have Twitter data from last year’s airing from the Twitter gardenhose. From that, we should be able to get a sense of who had the sway of public opinion on Twitter.

The graph below plots the last week of season 4, between the announcement that the queen would be crowned at the reunion, and the final reunion show. I chose to focus only on mentions of a queen’s Twitter handle, instead of using #TeamWhatever, because there weren’t many counts of those in the gardenhose. The first peak is the final contest show, and the second is the actual crowning.

The case here is rather clear cut — Sharon Needles leads everyone for nearly the whole time period. The raw counts of mentions show no contest there. I’m actually rather surprised that Phi Phi led Chad. Maybe there was another way they showed support for her?

We’re down to the final episode. This one is for all the marbles. Wait, that’s not the best saying in this context. In any case, moving right along. In the top four episode, Detox was eliminated, but not after Roxxxy threw maybe ALL of the shade towards Jinkx (although, to Roxxxy’s credit, she says a lot of this was due to editing).

Jinkx, however, defended herself well by absolutely killing the lipsync. Probably one of the top three of the season, easy.

Getting down to the wire, it’s looking incredibly close. As it is, the model has ceased to tell us anything of value. Here are the rankings:

But looking at the confidence intervals, all three estimates are statistically indistinguishable from zero. The remaining girls don’t have sufficient variation on the variables of interest to differentiate them from each other in terms of winning this thing.

So what’s drag race forecaster to do? Well, the first thought that came to my mind was — MOAR DATA. And hunty, there’s one place where I’ve got data by the troves — Twitter.

We’re in the Final Four now, the actual final four that matters (sorry sports forecasters).

Last week, Coco got the chop, which made sense statistically (she had a huge relative risk AND had been the first queen to have had to lipsync four times) and from a narrative standpoint — Alyssa got eliminated the week before so they didn’t really need to keep Coco around to continue all that drama.

So now the biggest question is who is getting kicked off this week and will leave us with our top three? Before I get to my predictions, I want to point readers to Dilettwat’s analysis, which, while uses no regressions, is still chock full of some interesting statistics about the top four and makes some predictions about who needs to do what in this episode to win.

For my own analysis, it’s looking very close here. Here are the numbers.

Jinkx and Alaska are neck-and-neck in this model, and confidence intervals make pairwise comparisons rather hard to make here. But this order is the same as Homoviper’s Index.

Just to get a sense of how close this is, here is a plot that tracks the relative risks across the last few weeks.

Last week, Coco’s relative risk was incredibly high, the highest it has been. This week, Detox has the only relative risk that is indistinguishable from zero, which makes me think she’s about to go. Which makes sense — she’s the only one in the group who has lipsynced more than once. So all I’m willing to say more confidently is that Detox goes home tonight.

On a totally different note, Jujubee came to Madison on Thursday and I got a chance to tell her about my forecasting efforts when we were taking some pictures…

Then I saw Nate Silver at the Midwest Political Science Association conference in Chicago. Unfortunately, there was not an opportunity for a Kate Silver/Nate Silver photo op. Maybe next time.

I’m scribbling this furiously because I had a busy weekend, but stay tuned for next week’s extra special analysis.

Last week, Alyssa got the boot and Jinkx kept her place. And I totally called it with my first model that accounted for the proportional hazards assumption. I think the model is having a little more success as the season plods on.

Before I get to the predictions for episode 10, there’s two really interesting prospects that may either give this model some more predictive power or become very interesting projects in their own right.

Last week, Alaska took it home with her dangerous performance, while Ivy Winters was sent home after going up against Alyssa Edwards. This is sad on many fronts. First, I love me some Ivy Winters. Second, Jinkx had revealed that she had a crush on Ivy, and the relationship that may have flourished between the two would have been too cute. But lastly, and possibly the worst, both of my models from last week had Ivy on top. Ugh.

What went wrong? Well, this certainly wasn’t Ivy’s challenge. But it’s high time that I started interrogating the models a little further.Continue reading →

Wow, last week’s Drag Race post made the rounds in the stats and Drag Race circles. It was cross-posted to Jezebel and has been getting some pretty high-profile links. A little birdy told me that Ms. Ru herself has read it. I think I can die a happy man knowing that RuPaul has visited Bad Hessian.

Anyhow, last week I tried to count Coco out. I was reading her like the latest AJS. The library is open. But her response to me was simple — girl, please:

If you follow me on Twitter, you know that I’m a big fan of RuPaul’s Drag Race. The transformation, the glamour, the sheer eleganza extravanga is something my life needs to interrupt the monotony of grad school. I was able to catch up on nearly four seasons in a little less than a month, and I’ve been watching the current (fifth) season religiously every Monday at Plan B, the gay bar across from my house.

I don’t know if this occurs with other reality shows (this is the first I’ve been taken with), but there is some element of prediction involved in knowing who will come out as the winner. A drag queen we spoke with at Plan B suggested that the length of time each queen appears in the season preview is an indicator, while Homoviper’s “index” is largely based on a more qualitative, hermeneutic analysis. I figured, hey, we could probably build a statistical model to know which factors are the most determinative in winning the competition.Continue reading →